Budget Axe to Gore America’s Future Exploration of Mars and Search for Martian Life

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America’s hugely successful Mars Exploration program is apparently about to be gutted by Obama Administration officials wielding a hefty budget axe in Washington, D.C. Consequently, Russia has been invited to join the program to replace American science instruments and rockets being scrapped.

NASA’s Fiscal 2013 Budget is due to be announced on Monday, February 13 and its widely reported that the Mars science mission budget will be cut nearly in half as part of a significant decline in funding for NASA’s Planetary Science Division.

The proposed deep slash to the Mars exploration budget would kill NASA’s participation in two new missions dubbed “ExoMars” set to launch in 2016 and 2018 as a joint collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA).

The ESA/NASA partnership would have dispatched the Trace Gas Orbiter to the Red Planet in 2016 to search for atmospheric methane, a potential signature for microbial life, and an advanced Astrobiology rover to drill deeper into the surface in 2018. These ambitious missions had the best chance yet to determine if Life ever evolved on Mars.

The 2016 and 2018 ExoMars probes were designed to look for evidence of life on Mars and set the stage for follow on missions to retrieve the first ever soil samples from the Red Planet’s surface and eventually land humans on Mars.

The BBC reports that “ a public announcement by NASA of its withdrawal from the ExoMars program will probably come once President Obama’s 2013 Federal Budget Request is submitted.”

A Feb. 9 article in ScienceInsider, a publication of the journal Science, states that “President Barack Obama will propose a $300 million cut in NASA’s planetary science programs as part of his 2013 request for the agency.”

This would amount to a 20% cut from $1.5 Billion in 2012 to $1.2 Billion in 2013. The bulk of that reduction is aimed squarely at purposefully eliminating the ExoMars program. And further deep cuts are planned in coming years !

ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter would search for atmospheric methane at Mars. NASA instruments to be deleted as a result of budget cuts. Credit: ESA
The Mars budget of about $580 million this year would be radically reduced by over $200 million, thereby necessitating the end of NASA’s participation in ExoMars. These cuts will have a devastating impact on American scientists and engineers working on Mars missions.

The fallout from the looming science funding cuts also caused one longtime and top NASA manager to resign.

“The Mars program is one of the crown jewels of NASA,” said Ed Weiler to ScienceInsider.

“In what irrational, Homer Simpson world would we single it out for disproportionate cuts?”

“This is not about the science mission directorate, this is not even about NASA. This is about the country. We are the only country in the world that has demonstrated the capability to land anything on Mars. How can we allow that to be undermined?”

Weiler’s resignation from NASA on Sept. 30, 2011 was sudden and quick, virtually from one day to the next. And it came shortly after the successful launch of NASA’s GRAIL lunar probes, when I spoke to Weiler about Mars and NASA’s Planetary Science missions and the gloomy future outlook. Read my earlier Universe Today story about Weiler’s retirement.

Ed Weiler was the Associate Administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) and his distinguished career spanned almost 33 years.

The dire wrangling over NASA’s 2013 budget has been ongoing for many months and some of the funding reductions had already leaked out. For example NASA had already notified ESA that the US could not provide funding for the Atlas V launchers in 2016 and 2018. Furthermore, Weiler and other NASA managers told me the 2018 mission was de-scoped from two surface rovers down to just one to try and save the Mars mission program.

ESA is now inviting Russian participation to replace the total American pullout, which will devastate the future of Red Planet science in the US. American scientists and science instruments would be deleted from the 2016 and 2018 ExoMars missions.

The only approved US mission to Mars is the MAVEN orbiter due to blastoff in 2013 – and there are NO cameras aboard MAVEN.

Three Generations of US Mars Rovers - 4th Generation ExoMars rover to be Axed by NASA budget cuts.

NASA is caught in an inescapable squeeze between rising costs for ongoing and ambitious new missions and an extremely tough Federal budget environment with politicians of both political affiliations looking to cut what they can to rein in the deficit, no matter the consequences of “killing the goose that laid the golden egg”.

NASA Watch Editor Keith Cowing wrote; “Details of the FY 2013 NASA budget are starting to trickle out. One of the most prominent changes will be the substantial cut to planetary science at SMD [NASA’s Science Mission Directorate]. At the same time, the agency has to eat $1 billion in Webb telescope overruns – half of which will come out of SMD.”

The cost of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has skyrocketed to $8.7 Billion.

To pay for JWST, NASA is being forced to gut the Mars program and other science missions funded by the same Science Mission Directorate that in the past and present has stirred the public with a mindboggling payoff of astounding science results from many missions that completely reshaped our concept of humankinds place in the Universe.

Meanwhile, China’s space program is rapidly expanding and employing more and more people. China’s scientific and technological prowess and patent applications are increasing and contributing to their fast growing economy as American breakthroughs and capabilities are diminishing.

Under the budget cutting scenario of no vision, the Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory rover will be America’s last Mars rover for a long, long time. Curiosity will thus be the third and last generation of US Mars rovers – 4th generation to be Axed !

Obama is committing political suicide. If the Democrats Hold up a leader that drags his nation back into the dark ages, the republicans are gonna eat him up. He would want to feed cloth and house the worlds poor with that money. Technological regression is not a policy to feel confident about. America has a space industry because the allies won world war 2, There is a responsibility to the Alliance to collective maintain the ethics and superiority of that victory, that is why America has a space program. As the mother of global economics America is well positioned to reshape a global economy that Feed Cloths and Houses the worlds poor, the information revolution is only accessible once you cross the digital divide when you can share in the knowledge we, all of us have. Business seeks to coerce and control all the best human behaviors and exploit them all for profit. Star Trek First contact, “our economy is very different to yours, ours is based on the Accumulation of knowledge” . We have an information economy, to preserve the sacred knowledge of the past is equal to exploration and Acquisition of new knowledge. Sorry Frasier I know how you h8 political discussion in your forums. How does America look, oh yeah, we will buy a moon rocket, oh, we changed our minds. Not Good Business, NASA must be increasingly embarrassed. As much as I like Obama, he is a lawyer, and they aren’t very adventurous. America needs another Kennedy, sadly, Obama could of done it, but no he didn’t. I hope he feeds the world, cause he ain’t taking anyone to the stars. That is the difference with a lawyer and a dreamer, they are very different.

Getting really tired of Obama talking up “shovel ready” solutions for the economy. Wish he would get his head out of the 1940’s and into the 2010’s; if we want America to recover *meaningful* jobs, and continue to be a world leader in technology, what we need are exactly the kinds of jobs he’s cutting here. Why can’t this administration see that? Instead of giving trillions to failed financial institutions, they should invest even 10% of that kind of money in *expanding* the space program.

The option isn’t national security or scientific advancement. How about scientific advancement is #1 and paying for that crucial portion of our country’s future comes from many areas? Especially from cutting out the bloated bureaucracy Bobama is building up. Let the American scientists work on a more positive future for all of us! American technology is the sead to our growing, not a burdon that we can just discpense with… We can’t just wish that one day prosperity might grow here.

Maybe one day our kids will grow up to want to learn a trade (and maybe become scientists) instead of learn to game the handout system being created that moves debt around from class to class. That will get us really far–NOT!

Obama did make cuts to the defense budget too. But I fully agree, the imbalance between defense spending and civil space science/tech spending in America is abhorrent to say the least.

Space needs to be publicized more, the average Joe doesn’t feel any promise or care about anything in space. Space just seems to be one big massive PR failure these days. Its really frustrating though when NASA’s direction gets swung around like an erratic compass every time a new president gets sworn in.

I’m not sure what you are asking me, but to be clear I am talking about the fact that the US defense budget is more than all other countries in the world combined, buying ridiculously expensive weapons so you can wage war on innocent people in middle eastern countries. If you are implying by your comment that all middle easterners are “terrorists with dubious ideologies” then you are buying into the retarded american propaganda machine and there is nothing I can do to help you except offer you this advice: Turn your TV off, not just today or tomorrow, FOREVER, and stop listening to things politicians tell you! If a politician is taking time out of his day to tell you something then most likely it is a blatant lie which he needs you to believe so he can make more money.

Let’s face it the original rich funding for the US space race was to ensure the USSR didn’t have a strategic advantage. Much as I wish it wasn’t so the space exporation fraternity merely reaped the benefits of military fears and now they have faded it has taken a while but so has the budget. If certain countries try to acquire space based nuclear weapons then you can guarantee a resurgence but depressingly, unless a truly dire shortage of terrestrial raw materials occurs, I can’t see a way past the cost accountants’ view that space exporation is a luxury the US can’t afford.

European government agencies have an inertia all of their own, even when spending vast sums of taxpayers’ money, so ESA programs are probably not so vulnerable but will inevitably be chipped away.

I’m not sure where the Russians are at, they seem to be mainly trying to make a profit but what intrigues me is why the Chinese seem to feel that spending lots of government money on space exploration is so worthwhile. What motivation do they have which eludes the rest of the world?

There is much more…. Russia and China are as bent as it comes. China is trying to bankrupt the west, while Russia is just full of corrupt poltiicans, Medvedev tried to put things right, but in the end he was just a puppet of Putin and was soon put in his place.

Irrelevant. We went to the Moon at the height of the Vietnam War and Cold War. It isn’t that war is too important to most people, it’s that space generally isn’t important *enough* to them.

NASA would not see one more dime in the absence of those conflicts, and has to justify itself no matter what we may or may not be doing elsewhere. Lamenting ‘If only we weren’t doing X’ gets us nowhere…

Bottom line. Either he fixes the US economy or he will lose the upcoming election.

The fantasy of the “golden egg” says it all, which is now mostly owned by foreign investors or by financial loans made to the US by China, etc. In the end, the blame falls squarely on the Americans, who have mismanaged and squandered their economic potential for far too long. To reemerge and avoid economic catastrophe, like defaulting on their loans, there is only one solution — austerity.

Slightly disappointed with the responses here, though I thought it would be something like I’d expect from average Americans.

My quite open point is not that one program over another program that should be ended, but the spending cuts should be across the board on all public programs. Perhaps these Mars expedition should not be curbed, yet that would mean cuts in other government areas would have to be cut deeper. You have a choice, but the time to act is now and not just put it off for another day.

Let’s deal with the facts not the hype. The Congressional Budget Office Director, Douglas Elmendorf on 2nd February 2012 said: “How much and how quickly the deficit declines will depend in part on how well the economy does over the next few years. Probably more critical, though, will be the fiscal policy choices made by lawmakers,…”.

Gross National Product (GDP), being what the US produced, was $15 trillion in 2011. It is predicted to be about $15.4 trillion in 2012 — still -$1.3 trillion in Government debt!

Clearly, something’s got to give to balance the budget!

(I’d agree with the Mars missions, if it can be proven that it adds to economic recovery or jobs. If it does not, it should be halted to the economy has improved. )

Americans (and many other third world countries too) have a clear choice in the next few years. Either you avoid the economy falling into the abyss or that you start correcting the budget government defect and begin serious austerity measures. This serious problem is well above political parties or Presidents, but it does take leadership and Americans “biting the bullet” and work hard to get out of the dire mess America is presently in. Don’t do it and remain complacent, and you will get exactly what you deserve.

(Endlessly blaming other countries and bleating about them getting ahead of the USA sounds more like complacency. If you want to improve the situation, get your fingers out, and start returning the economy to something that is at least sustainable! The path that the US is presently heading is bankruptcy and oblivion — dangerous for Americans and the whole world economy.)

There’s so much waste in government. No, I’m not talking of programs to help the poor and the otherwise needy (those are as infinitely important) but corporate welfare, low tax rates on the wealthy, government duplicity, a bloated defense budget, an overblown empire of military bases, waste in the form of lack of preventative healthcare, administrative costs from the current managed-care system, and a thousand other factors which add up to almost a trillion dollars, if not more. A small amount of that money could be invested in space, with which our scientific research AND human advancement could forge full speed ahead and not wait for political bickering.

Too bad it wasn’t Republican budget cuts. Then you would surely blame those science-fearing Republicans. But hey, it seems like the Democrats in the Senate have just about given up on forming a budget of their own and are content with just giving the money to Obama in appropriation bills and letting him decide which NASA programs get axed.

The one good thing that will come out of this is that when/if the ESA/Russia ExoMars program finds evidence of life on Mars, we’ll have a new space race on our hands. God forbid we let the Russians beat us in anything…

It may just create enough backlash and raise attention in congress to actually increase funding for the program. The last time Obama asked for x amount for Commercial space, congress gave half as much funding as requested. Is this reverse psychology, here????

That would suck for the USA if ESA and Russia discovered life. But, the future is not that bleak if you end wars. Obama is doing a great job, things for the future, but some missions are going to suffer now.

Why? Because it would be one of the most amazing discoveries in the history of science, and NASA’s mars budget would probably go up by an order of magnitude for further study? Science is not a zero sum game, I wish whoever is willing to look the best of luck.

It’s sad to see worthy initiatives get tabled but it’s an economic reality. Sadder still is the coarsening of the rhetoric on both political sides displayed in the comments here. We’re going to be bickering as we go over the edge at which point there will likely be no space program whatsoever.

It’s a shame, but, learning about life on other planets – for the human race, is it NECESSARY?
Can microscopic Bacteria/Microbes actually HELP us in the grand scheme of things?
No, not really.
It’s a shame that they’re going to end up being cancelled – but I can understand why they’re doing it. Why waste money on rockets and rovers when you can invest it in killing people instead? ^^
I joke – but on that note, perhaps Nasa will invest its government-funded money a bit more wisely in the future. If they spent a single years worth of funds on nothing but engine development – or decided to stop beating around the bush and build the Orbital Elevator already, the amount of money saved (Within a few years) would be astronomical!
Building the Satellites isn’t all that expensive, getting them safely into orbit is the tricky & expensive bit.

Nice sense of proportion. It’s not like the Mars-files have been deprived.

There will be years of juicy new scientific data from Mars for everyone, when the recently launched Mars Science Laboratory Rover arrives on site later this year. That mission will no-doubt be extended as well.

Yes, it is necessary. Science _always_ pays off in the long run, in ways that are not immediately apparent, and science that doesn’t do so directly do so by supporting other science.

Whether there is life elsewhere is precisely one of those old “grand scheme” questions – are we alone? In that sense it is an area more necessary than most. Exolife properties and the circumstances that brings it about will help us define biology and astrobiology, both of which has great medical and social returns.

In that sense, as I commented above, choosing JWST over ExoMars will tell us more on “Microbes”. (Nitpick: Since Bacteria was found to be a likely monophyletic clade, with Archaea/Eukaryotes on a separate branching from the universal root, people are reluctant to name potential prokaryotes elsewhere “bacteria”.)

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OT: Orbital Elevator!? Nobody knows if they are feasible. That is why there are, IIRC, yearly competitions making people build ever better prototypes for cables and cable cars.

Science and research is never a waste of money. It creates new technologies which will trickle down to humanity. Computer chips is one such example.

But not only electronics advances, but also advances in materials that could be used for the fire brigade or extreme conditions.

Also the technology to detect microbial life on Mars could be used here to detect microbes in food/water, environment much faster, simpler and easier.

Communication technology, the technology to send data from Mars can be used for more efficient data channels here on Earth.

Also important is to realize that every newly created technology can be patented and is a money pot for the US. If you wait until the Chinese developed that technology and patented it, then you will have to pay the Chinese.

Exactly. From my (objective, non-American) point of view, most of Obama’s policies are neutral in overall effect, while a very few of them will produce negative results for the US as a whole. Even fewer will have a positive net effect.

So I’m not exactly an Obama fan. Overall his policies seem to be having no substantive positive effect.

But look at the things proposed by the people running against Obama. From the extremes of Ron Paul (total isolationism, going back to a standards based currency… which worked *oh so well* in the past… not) to the lackluster centrism of Romney… not one of them has proposed anything that isn’t even worse than what Obama is doing right now.

So does Obama suck? Yes. Is he better than his potential replacements? Absolutely, with the possibly exception of Jon Huntsman, who has less chance of being elected than Donald Trump:P. And while Huntsman’s proposed policies aren’t idiotic like Paul’s, Gingrich’s, or Cain’s, that’s about the only good thing that can be said about them. Overall I doubt he’d fair any better than Obama is.

So who would all of you vote for instead? No single person can fix decades (at the very least) of bad policies from various congresses and administrations. No matter who you elect, the reality of the situation will prevent the radical soundbite policies proposed by various candidates from being successfully enacted. The US is in a tough situation, full stop.

That said, cutting the space program is stupid. Reorganize it? Sure. But cutting funding from something that provides so much medium and long term benefit to the country (and the world) is just plain dumb.

The big problem with the US budget is in out of control health spending. The US government spends as much per capita on health spending as the Canadian government does, and then the private sector spends that much again. That’s ridiculous. US taxpayers are paying for the same service twice. Once though the government, and once through private insurance. They really need to fix that clusterf**k of a health system.

What’s even sadder about that is that Canada has by far the highest per capita health spending in the world with the exception of the US. So the US has less than half the efficiency of the world’s second most inefficient and useless healthcare provider. Eeesh.

Here’s hoping that as (if) the economy recovers, Curiosity returns amazing images and results long enough to bring some public attention to this issue, and perhaps return funding in time. If the sky crane system turns out to work as planned, it would be criminal negligence to let a system that capable be abandoned after only one use. There is a continuous thread of technology development from Pathfinder to MSL and it needs to be kept alive.

Note that this is an administration that prioritize science and education, and tried to avoid the SLS pork laws. We are lucky that JWST didn’t gobble up more science and that it happened under this administration.

Weiler is ridiculed in some comment threads, because while he is lamenting economical decisions on ExoMars he is at least partly responsible for the JWST economical fiasco.

As an astrobiology student I rather choose JWST, that has capability to do some unique exoplanetary studies, over ExoMars, which is starting to get into the haphazard territory of looking for organics and extant and extinct life. It is possible that many rovers could be sent before we stumble on the goods.

NASA is being forced to gut the Mars program and other science missions funded by the same Science Mission Directorate that in the past and present has stirred the public with a mindboggling payoff of astounding science results from many missions that completely reshaped our concept of humankinds [sic] place in the Universe.

Finally the article prompts me to note that the hard choice is good for NASA and science too. Above all Hubble captured the notice, minds and at times the emotions of the public. James Webb will do the same.

Finding an alien microbe would get you a week of headlines. Finding an alien tree might get you two weeks. Finding an alien animal probably about a month and finding an alien civilization would get you probably two months. Then people would go back to obsessing about their sports and entertainment stars. Most people really don’t care a great deal about xenogeology. Yet another probe to Mars and more regolith analysis just doesn’t grip them. Face it, humans won’t get to mars until a billionaire wants to go there.

Yes, the US War on Economy is the main point. US has the excellent notion that failures are educational and must be permitted (try that in a swedish consensus culture!), so you would think “a JWST” now and then could be soaked up.

The trouble is not the total NASA budget but waste on expensive programs that are not needed. If SLS/MPCV were scrapped as originally intended then there would be $3B per year for real programs such as Mars science and CCDev and fuel dumps and inflatable habitats. The US could have a base on the moon in 5 years as a stepping stone to a base on Mars if was not for Congressional pork with SLS/MPCV.

Gee, you could make up for the $300k cut to SMD, and then some, by reducing by 1 the count of Boeing P-8A Poseidon maritime surveillance planes the Penatagon will acquire in the next year.

According to the NYTimes today “The Navy’s plans call for unchanged procurement of 13 P-8A Boeing planes in fiscal 2013 and 17 in fiscal 2014, but would cut the buy to 20 planes each in fiscal 2015 and 2016, dropping to 13 in the final year of the five-year budget plan.” And “The U.S. Navy would save $5.2 billion through fiscal 2017 by buying 10 fewer Boeing Co P-8A Poseidon maritime surveillance planes[…]” from which you can deduce, roughly, the cost per item. Surely there are a lot of other costs, NRE, support etc, hidden in the cost of the individual planes, but still.

The policy is alot like the “firemen first” policy of the Virgin Islands.

Anytime the budget must be cut because the voters demand it, politicians make it a point to cull public services (fire, ems, police, teachers, etc…) long before they touch the budget for any of their failing projects or bloated personal staff.
That way they can say they made the most painful cuts at election time and sing a song about how they need to borrow more money.

The president is going after NASA’s budget because its more visible. Not because there’s no money to pay for science.

This might be a stupid question (I’m not a scientist) but why is the space program so important? I personally find it very fascinating, but I’m trying to look at it through all points of views. I feel that we should help people not go hungry and stuff, but I was thinking maybe the space program could somehow help the economy? And I’m not going to pretend to know anything about the war. Can someone tell me a good website explaining the benefits of NASA? I’m trying to educate myself 🙂

We happen to be some way that the universe has come to observe and know about itself. These types of research are then a way in which maybe the universe comes to frame itself in a conscious manner. This would be the ultimate bootstrap, or self-referential, self-excited loop. The quantum world is one where observers are not passive players in the game, but are active participators in determining the outcome of an observation. By this manner the universe comes to observe itself, and its existence becomes ontology.

Astronomy is the study of the fantastically large, and particle physics of the quantum near infinitesimal. Ultimately the two domains of understanding should have some sort of duality or unification. At this point we may then come to understand the universe beyond the current limits of our ignorance.

There are of course less cosmic topics, such as planetary research. In these cases we send robots to the solar system planets, and of course we have come to know about 2300 other planets in the galactic vicinity. In this way we can understand further something of the role of life in the universe and how the vast diversity of possible outcomes are involved with providing the sort of “landscape” for the existence of life.

I will have to confess I am skeptical of the business of putting people in cans and sending them into space. This is where space programs become very expensive, and it is not at all certain to me that there is some grand space faring future.

This might be a stupid question (I’m not a scientist) but why is the space program so important? I personally find it very fascinating, but I’m trying to look at it through all points of views. I feel that we should help people not go hungry and stuff, but I was thinking maybe the space program could somehow help the economy? And I’m not going to pretend to know anything about the war. Can someone tell me a good website explaining the benefits of NASA? I’m trying to educate myself 🙂

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Episode 660: Crew Dragon Reaches the Station. What it Took to Replace the Space Shuttle

On Sunday, May 31st, 2020, a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule carrying astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley docked with the International Space Station. This was a tremendous accomplishment for SpaceX and NASA, giving the United States the capability of launching its own astronauts, and no longer relying on its Russian partners.

This was the 5th time that US astronauts went into orbit on a new kind of space vehicle, following in the footsteps of Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the Space Shuttle.